> on Windows 98 it just started swapping, but it was no big deal. At that time, swapping out a 4k page was a significant part of memory: 4k of 16 MiB is 1/4096

> on Windows 98 it just started swapping, but it was no big deal. At that time, swapping out a 4k page was a significant part of memory: 4k of 16 MiB is 1/4096 of memory. Each swap gets back a lot of memory the program needs. Now the swap is still 4k pages, but memory has expanded by a thousand fold. Basically swap is a thousand times worse today than it was in the time of Windows 98. For harddrives swap isn't used now to expand memory, it's used to remove initialization code and other 'dead' memory. Swap should be set to only a tiny fraction of the memory size for this reason, to prevent it from being used to handle actual out-of-memory conditions. But realistically for most users it's not even worth enabling at all because of the occasional memory that needs to be swapped in from disk. For SSDs the seek speed has improved to match the extra memory so swap can still be used like in the old days to expand the effective memory size. But memory is so large a swap file that's a fraction of memory size to offload 'dead' memory is enough unless there's a specific reason to actually use swap for out-of-memory.